Amarna Energy Solutions Limited

Mobile application based on a BER assessment

Paul Sheridan (PS) has a background in BER assessment and has also studied the UK equivalent SAP, and German, passive house design. Since 2003, Paul has been building up the resources that underpin the tandem assessment and modelling spreadsheet for the H3E application, which he outlined in his initial meetings with the team. Paul has been using components of the spreadsheet to complete tasks since 2008/2009.

Amarna are looking to build a mobile application based on a BER assessment that will measure and model the BER performance of homes, focused first on targeting homeowners living in houses built pre-2006. The more accurate the square meterage of the house the more accurate the cost of energy upgrades to the home owner. This is the goal of the application to help the user see how the upgrades can benefit their house and give them ballpark costings of upgrades and yearly savings on home heating.

Space heat demand flows

Working with the TSSG Technology Gateway, an initial set of user personas were created, focussing on the homeowner, perform user research to determine the types of user personas. Consider different types of homeowner and their context. E.g.

• buying a house doesn’t have a sense of the house’s particular energy quirks,
• will the seller have a BER as part of the process
• User who has been living in the house just a short time,
• Users who have been living in the house 20+ years
• Users who are carrying out other upgrade works

Then user journeys were explored looking at the space heat demand flows provided by the client. These are the areas that have the biggest saving and are the areas that generate grants, it is the most complex area of the solution therefore it was agreed to focus on these functional areas first for the voucher.

Using the output of the user journey research TSSG created low and high-fidelity Wireframes designing a UI focussing on ease of use therefore reducing the time to complete tasks and over all eradicate the cognitive load of its users.

The low fidelity designs were used to quickly build and map out components, determine placement of requirements and could be altered very quickly whereas the high-fidelity design gave the application a more professional complete look to the application.

Thereby the goal of the IV’s, to create an “Intuitive User Experience” through a Mid Fidelity Wireframed UI Screen produced the following deliverables:

• Personas
• User Journeys mapping every user’s persona and possible variations of routes through the application
• Mid Fidelity Wireframes
• High Fidelity Wireframe

The Amarna & TSSG Technology Gateway partnership

Amarna approached TSSG to solve a problem and the first step to the solution was to discover what the user’s needs were and how to they would interact with the Amarna’s UI. After working closely with Paul Sheridan – Owner of Amarna, TSSG created personas to learn who his users are and to find out their needs and pain points of using applications like his. Using the output of this research TSSG created User flows to map out the screens. Following this a Mid Fidelity / High fidelity Wireframes UI that had ease of use was created that would help reduce time to complete tasks and over all eradicate cognitive load of its users.

Amarna will be in a position whereby they will have a complete user flow and strategy along with a set of high-fidelity wireframes for the primary users allowing Paul Sheridan to further explore the concept and build upon to translate into a working commercial product. Benefits include;

• Features, functionality and Navigation of the application.
• Reduces development time.
• Allows us to test the platform with users and get feedback.
• Demonstrate the platform to potential stakeholders.